More than 30 years after a nuclear weapons plant exploded in the Ural Mountains, Soviet television reported that 400,000 people were affected by doses of radiation higher than the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
The dosage accumulated from three accidents near the Urals town of Chelyabinsk: the weapons plant blast in 1957, a leakage in the early 1950s and another incident in 1967, television said.Soviet television said the report, based on the findings of a 50-member commission of medical specialists, had been prepared one year ago but was kept off the air by top television authorities. It was shown Thursday.
The Soviet Union admitted for the first time in June 1989 that a tank of radioactive waste had exploded at a weapons plant near Chelyabinsk in 1957. Before the Chernobyl explosion, Western experts called the Urals disaster the world's worst nuclear accident.
Television flashed figures on the screen saying that the Urals accident released 1.2 billion curies of radiation but gave no source for the data. The June 1989 Tass report on the accident said that 2 million curies had been released.
Fifty million curies of radidation were released in the Chernobyl explosion in which at least 32 people died. The 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania released 14 curies, a measure of the amount of radioactivity contained in a material.
Anatoly Tsyb, one of 50 medical specialists investigating the accident, said the area had been devastated by three accidents in all.
More than 400,000 people were affected by those releases of radiation, he estimated.
He did not say exactly where the nuclear weapons accident occurred, but some Western reports have said it was at the Soviet Union's first nuclear production plant in Kyshtym, about 55 miles northwest of Chelyabinsk.
In the early 1950s, radioactive wastes were dumped into the Techa River just north of Chelyabinsk. Then came the 1957 explosion and in 1967, wind carried radioactive waste over a lake in the area that dried up as a result. Television did not explain why the lake had vanished.
Tsyb said there were 935 cases of chronic radiation sickness in the area and that the incidence of leukemia was 40 percent higher than in a control group used for comparison.
He also said infant mortality is higher than average in the affected zone, which he said measured 5.5 miles by 65 miles or 576 square miles, an area about half the size of Rhode Island.
Tsyb said that at the time of the 1957 accident, doctors were not told how much radiation had been released and therefore were unable to treat the victims correctly.
A Soviet television commentator said it was not known if there were deaths. Two years ago, the Tass news agency said that no deaths had occurred, but a secret CIA file made public in 1977 quoted Soviet sources as saying hundreds of people were killed.
Tsyb said that most of the people who dealt with the consequences of the acccidents were soldiers and that nobody knew what happened to the servicemen because the accident was kept secret.
The Mayak weapons plant near Chelyabinsk, a city 987 miles southeast of Moscow, split radioactive materials for nuclear bombs which were built and tested in the area, Tsyb told television.
U.S. experts have estimated that the 1957 Urals accident released more radiation than the American atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945.
The Urals accident was first disclosed in 1972 by Soviet biochemist Zhores Medvedev, who now lives in Great Britain.